Start With Why

WHY—while the HOW-types sit below and are responsible for actually making things happen. The leader imagines the destination and the HOW-types find the route to get there. A destination without a route leads to meandering and inefficiency, something a great many WHY-types will experience without the help of others to ground them. A route without a destination, however, may be efficient, but to what end? It’s all fine and good to know how to drive, but it’s more fulfilling when you have a place to go. For Dr. King, Ralph Abernathy was one of those he inspired and who knew HOW to make the cause actionable and tangible. “Dr. King’s job was to interpret the ideology and theology of non-violence,” said Abernathy. “My job was more simple and down-to-earth. I would tell [people], ‘Don’t ride those buses.’”
    In every case of a great charismatic leader who ever achieved anything of significance, there was always a person or small group lurking in the shadows who knew HOW to take the vision and make it a reality. Dr. King had a dream. But no matter how inspiring a dream maybe, a dream that cannot come to life stays a dream. Dr. King dreamed of many of the same things as countless other African Americans who grew up in the pre–civil rights South. He spoke of many of the same themes. He felt the same outrage perpetrated by an unjust system. But it was King’s unflappable optimism and his words that inspired a population.
    Dr. King didn’t change America by himself. He wasn’t a legislator, for example, but legislation was created to give all people in the United States equal rights regardless of skin color. It wasn’t Dr. King who changed America; it was the movement of millions of others whom he inspired that changed the course of history. But how do you organize millions of people? Forget millions, how do you organize hundreds or tens of people? The vision and charisma of the leader are enough to attract the innovators and the early adopters. Trusting their guts and their intuition, these people will make the greatest sacrifices to help see the vision become a reality. With each success, with every tangible demonstration that the vision can in fact become reality, the more practical-minded majority starts to take interest. What was previously just a dream soon becomes a provable and tangible reality. And when that happens, a tipping point can be reached and then things really get moving.

Those Who Know WHY Need Those Who Know HOW
    The pessimists are usually right, to paraphrase Thomas Friedman, author of The World Is Flat , but it’s the optimists who change the world. Bill Gates imagined a world in which the computer could help us all reach our greatest potential. And it happened. Now he imagines a world in which malaria does not exist. And it will happen. The Wright brothers imagined a world in which we’d all take to the skies as easily as we catch the bus. And it happened. WHY-TYPES have the power to change the course of industries or even the world . . . if only they knew HOW.
    WHY-types are the visionaries, the ones with the overactive imaginations. They tend to be optimists who believe that all the things they imagine can actually be accomplished. HOW-types live more in the here and now. They are the realists and have a clearer sense of all things practical. WHY-types are focused on the things most people can’t see, like the future. HOW-types are focused on things most people can see and tend to be better at building structures and processes and getting things done. One is not better than the other, they are just different ways people naturally see and experience the world. Gates is a WHY-type. So were the Wright brothers. And Steve Jobs. And Herb Kelleher. But they didn’t do it alone. They couldn’t. They needed those who knew HOW.
    “If it hadn’t been for my big brother, I’d have been in jail several times for checks bouncing,” said Walt Disney, only half joking, to a Los Angeles audience in 1957. “I never knew what was in the bank. He kept me on the straight and narrow.” Walt Disney was a WHY-TYPE, a dreamer whose dream came true thanks to the help of his more sensible older brother Roy, a HOW-type.
    Walt Disney began his career creating cartoon drawings for advertisements, but moved quickly to making animated movies. It was 1923 and Hollywood was emerging as the heart of the movie business, and Walt wanted to be part of it. Roy, who was eight years older, had been